About the AuthorEd Moyle

Ask any security practitioner about ransomware nowadays, and chances are good you’ll get an earful. Recent outbreaks like Petya and WannaCry have left organizations around the world reeling, and statistics show that ransomware is on the rise. For example, 62 percent of participants surveyed for ISACA’s recent “Global State of Cybersecurity” survey experienced a ransomware attack in 2016.

By this point, most technology practitioners — and nearly all security practitioners — know about WannaCry. In fact, you might be sick of people analyzing it, rehashing it, sharing “lessons learned” about it, and otherwise laying out suggestions — in some cases, contradictory — about what you might do differently in the future. The level of unsolicited advice can border on the annoying.

If you’ve ever spent time in a desert, it may seem inconceivable to you that creatures actually can live there. The fact that animals not only survive, but also thrive in those conditions seems counterintuitive. In fact, a number of animals do so — in many cases, they are aided by an array of specialized adaptations that allow them to leverage the environment to their advantage.

Information security practices are undergoing a transformation. For at least a decade, environments have been becoming less perimeter-centric: Gone are the good old days when in-line controls protected the trusted, safe interior from the “wild west” of the outside. As environments become more complex and externalized, the traditional “perimeter” loses meaning.

There’s a folk-story that all Japanese schoolchildren learn about an old man who lives in a village by the sea. One day, an earthquake hits. He’s the only person in the village to realize that a tsunami will soon follow. He hurries to the nearby mountainside where the rice for the village is grown and sets the entire harvest aflame. All of the villagers race to the mountainside to deal with the conflagration — their rice is their most precious resource.